the hour: but I have been taught caution.
Secure as my own prudence may have made me from farther apprehension of
Houseman, I will yet place myself wholly beyond his power: I will still
consummate my former purpose, adopt a new name, and seek a new retreat;
Madeline may not know the real cause; but this brain is not barren of
excuse. Ah!" as drawing his cloak closer round him, he felt the purse
hid within his breast which contained the order he had obtained from
Lester; "Ah! this will now add its quota to purchase, not a momentary
relief, but the stipend of perpetual silence. I have passed through the
ordeal easier than I had hoped for. Had the devil at his heart been
more difficult to lay, so necessary is his absence, that I must have
purchased it at any cost. Courage, Eugene Aram! thy mind, for which thou
hast lived, and for which thou hast hazarded thy soul--if soul and mind
be distinct from each other--thy mind can support thee yet through
every peril: not till thou art stricken into idiotcy, shalt thou behold
thyself defenceless. How cheerfully," muttered he, after a momentary
pause, "how cheerfully, for safety, and to breathe with a quiet heart,
the air of Madeline's presence, shall I rid myself of all save enough
to defy want. And want can never now come to me, as of old. He who knows
the sources of every science from which wealth is wrought holds even
wealth at his will."

Breaking at every interval into these soliloquies, Aram continued to
breast the storm until he had won half his journey, and had come upon
a long and bleak moor, which was the entrance to that beautiful line of
country in which the valleys around Grassdale are embosomed: faster and
faster came the rain; and though the thunder-clouds were now behind,
they yet followed loweringly, in their black array, the path of the
lonely horseman.

But now he heard the sound of hoofs making towards him; he drew his
horse on one side of the road, and at that instant a broad flash of
lightning illumining the space around, he beheld four horsemen speeding
along at a rapid gallop; they were armed, and conversing loudly--their
oaths were heard jarringly and distinctly amidst all the more solemn
and terrific sounds of the night. They came on, sweeping by the Student,
whose hand was on his pistol, for he recognised in one of the riders the
man who had escaped unwounded from Lester's house. He and his comrades
were evidently, then, Houseman's desperate associates;